Set your non-violent revolution to dance rhythms
and you can change the world.
and you can change the world.
Happy Birthday Nelson Mandela!!!
As always, crank it up!!!
Tag Archives: Today in History
Brian Jones ► A Musical Appreciation
Let’s face facts: The Rolling Stones was his band. After hanging around London in the early ’60s with musicians like Alexis Korner, Jack Bruce, and Paul Jones, Brian Jones decided to start his own band. He placed an advert in “Jazz News” looking for other musicians who could play the music of his ‘Merkin Blues heroes. First Ian Stuart, then Mick Jagger joined. Jagger brought along Keith Richards and the core of the group was established. Brian Jones named the group after a Muddy Water’s song “Rollin’ Stones Blues” and the rest is history and millions of records sold.
It’s been 43 years, but we still miss him. Stone aficionados TO THIS DAY still argue whether the group was better before or after Brian Jones was fired.
Rest in peace, Brian.
Here is a Brian Jones Jukebox to honour the young boy who so thought ‘Merkin Blues the greatest thing in the world that he created his own band to play it. The little Blues band he built to play the music in his head became the greatest Rock and Roll group in the world: The Rolling Stones. Now, that’s a legacy!!!
As always, CRANK IT UP!!!
Happy Canada Day!!!
I feel the most nostalgic for Canada on Canada Day.
One of the most famous Canadians is Captain Kirk…I mean, William Shatner:
However, he’s not the only famous Canadian. Do you want it in alphabetical order with a great beat?
Only true Canadians watched that video to the very end. Mostly Canadians are known for their sense of humour.
The reason there are so many “I am Canadian” parodies is because that was a famous advertising slogan for beer, the thing against which all Canadian culture is still measured.
However, as I like to point out to most of my Canadian friends and family: You all had no choice and were born Canadian. I chose Canada. Here I am getting my Canadian citizenship, a very meaningful moment for me.
 |
| This is the woman who made us swear to the Queen and all her heirs and assigns. I should remember her name, but the day was a blur. |
I think that was also the last time I was drunk, as my friends plied me with scotch on the rocks all night long at The Ben Wicks because it also happened to be the night of a Munch. Oh, Canada!!!
Happy Birthday ► Mel Kaminsky
Dateline June 28, 1926 – Melvin Kaminski is born in Brooklyn, New York. It will be many years before he changes his name to Mel Brooks and makes the world laugh. Born only in 1926? Feels like Mel Brooks is as old as The Bible.
I’m not sure I believe that birth year. Mel Brooks has offered proof over and over he is at least a 2,000 Year Old Man.
Deep down inside, Mel Brooks wants to be known as a song and dance man. Over the years he’s given us some terrific Musical numbers.
No one in Pop Culture, including Glenn Beck, has made more references to Nazis.
Brooks has also mined Rap more than once, with equally fun results.
And, this is why people call me Hedley Lamarr:
However, my favourite Mel Brooks movie is the little known The Twelve Chairs, which was released in 1970 between The Producers and Blazing Saddles. Here is the whole movie:
Happy Birthday, Mel!!! Thanks!!!
Today’s Irony ► Malicious Virus Spoils Birthday Celebrations in Oceania
Dateline June 25, 1903 – Future, and futurist, English writer George Orwell is born as Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, Bihar, India. Today “Orwellian” is an adjective everyone knows. That Big Brother is watching over us was his concept, as was the idea of “Thoughcrime” and “thoughtpolice,” words now used daily.
However, we only know Orwell as a novelist. In his lifetime he was best known as a journalist and Socialist. According to the WickiWackyWoo:
During most of his career, Orwell was best known for his journalism,
in essays, reviews, columns in newspapers and magazines and in his books
of reportage: Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these cities), The Road to Wigan Pier (describing the living conditions of the poor in northern England, and the class divide generally) and Homage to Catalonia. According to Irving Howe, Orwell was “the best English essayist since Hazlitt, perhaps since Dr Johnson.”[86]
Modern readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is often thought to reflect degeneration in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism; the latter, life under totalitarian rule. Nineteen Eighty-Four is often compared to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; both are powerful dystopian novels warning of a future world where the state machine exerts complete control over social life. In 1984, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451 were honoured with the Prometheus Award for their contributions to dystopian literature. In 2011 he received it again for Animal Farm.
Here’s the supreme irony:
Maybe we already live in a dystopian society and we just don’t recognize it yet. I would have preferred to quote from the official George Orwell site. However, it’s been infected by malware. Clicking on it garners this message:
Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer!
However, let’s forget all that unpleasantness and watch this wonderful BBC drama of 1984, broadcast in 1950, just two years after the novel was published. The more things change, the more they stay the same:
And, if you’ve never seen the animated Animal Farm from 1954, here’s a treat for you:
Finally, the late Christopher Hitchen at the 2002 Hay Festival, on his book “Why Orwell Matters.”
Remember: Some animals are more equal than others. Just ask today’s GOP.
A Tribute To Alan Turing ► The Man Who Saved The World
Dateline June 23, 1912 – Alan Turing was born on this day. Who dat? Oh, just the man who saved millions of lives and maybe the world during World War Two by cracking the Nazi U Boat codes and building the Enigma machine. Doesn’t ring a bell yet? Surely you know him. He’s the guy who, in 1936, built the Universal Turing Machine, which used stored programs, making it a direct descendant of whatever device you are reading this on at this exact moment; essentially a modern computer.
Yet, why have so few people heard about Alan Turing? He died young to start with, at 42, by his own hand after (rumor has it) he ate a poisoned apple in 1954.* But here’s the real reason we don’t know his name: In 1952 Turing was prosecuted as a homosexual, which was a crime at the time. In order to avoid a prison term he agreed to be chemically castrated. However, his security clearances were revoked and he could no longer carry on his work for the government. He committed suicide on my birthday, June 7, 1954. * In 2009 British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized for Turing’s treatment at the hand of the government, which he called “appalling.”
Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him … So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.
To honour the centenary of a very important, but almost forgotten, person, Google produced one of it’s most comprehensible doodles ever:
Events are planned all around the world today, and for the next year, which has been dubbed Alan Turing Year. As well, the Science Museum in Kensington opened a year-long exhibit this week called “Codebreaker – Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy.” The web site states:
Alan Turing is most widely known for his critical involvement in the codebreaking at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. But Alan Turing was not just a codebreaker.
This British mathematician was also a philosopher and computing pioneer who grappled with the fundamental problems of life itself. His ideas have helped shape the modern world, including early computer programming and even the seeds of artificial intelligence. This exhibition tells the story of Turing and his most important ideas.
At the heart of the exhibition is the Pilot ACE computer, built to Turing’s ground-breaking design. It is the most significant surviving Turing artefact in existence.
It offers a small documentary on Turing’s life and work:
Is there any doubt that had Alan Turing not been labeled homosexual, everyone would know his name today?
* At a conference at Oxford today, Professor Jack Copeland was sheduled to present his theory on why Turing’s death might not have been a suicide after all.
Day In History ► Day In Music ► June 21st
 |
| Dr. Goldmark examining creation of a 33 1/3 record. Pic used by Fair Use, even tho’ Corbus thinks it owns it. |
Dateline June 21, 1948 – Dr. Peter Goldmark, of CBS, demonstrated the first 12 inch LP, “Long Playing” record, that spun at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute, as opposed to the 10 inch 78 RPM record. You could only shove about three and a half minutes of music on one side of a 78. A symphony or opera issued on 78, would come in an album with any number of platters to spin out the entire length of the piece. In contrast the LP would hold about 28 minutes of music a side. With this the format wars wars ON! RCA refused to pay CBS for the license to press LPs, so it came out with its own format, the 45 RPM disc, 7″ wide with a bigger hole in the middle. The 45 could hold more music than a 78, but not nearly as much as a LP. No one really won this format war. These two systems remained viable formats side-by-side until the digital compact disc, CD, almost put vinyl out of business.
Dateline June 21, 1969: The worst song ever released!!! On this day One Hit Wonders Zager & Evans release the biggest piece of crap in all of recorded music, and that includes “An Evening With Wild Man Fisher.” Ladies and gentlemen, I give you “In the Year 2525.” REMEMBER: I tried to warn you.
What’s your least favourite song?
Happy Birthday, Moe Howard ► Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be
Dateline June 19, 1897 – Moe Howard, future leader of The Three Stooges, was born Moses Harry Horwitz on this date. He would be joined later in life with older brother Samuel (Shemp) and younger brother Jerome (Curly) at different times in one of the longest-running comedy teams in show bidnezz.
Moe Howard began in vaudeville with “Ted Healy and his Stooges,” along with brother Shemp. Soon Healy hired violinist Larry Fine and the Three Stooges were born, more or less, even tho’ they weren’t called that yet. Shemp made one ‘Stooge’ movie with Healy and quit the Stooges to start a solo career. Moe suggested younger brother Jerome/Curly and, after they managed to get rid of Healy, this was the trio that starting making all those Columbia shorts over the years, starting in 1934, and eventually running to 190 with a few cast changes.
In 1946 Curly had a stroke and was replaced by Shemp, who returned to the act where he started. According to the WikiWackyWoo the three Howard brothers made one movie together: 1949’s Hold That Lion. However, further strokes led to Curly’s death in 1952, the year of my birth. Yet, he was very much alive for my childhood.
Shemp died in 1955, yet appeared in four more Three Stooges movies after that, since there was enough footage in the can, but was eventually replaced by Joe Besser. Columbia sold off the Stooge film library to tee vee through the company Screen Gems and that’s when and where subsequent generations learned how to poke people’s eyes out and hit each other over the head with hammers.
Their tee vee poularity led to Moe forming a new Three Stooge ensemble, replacing Joe Besser with Joe DeRita, or Curly-Joe. This trio made several feature length movies and a few guest appearances until they were reduced to a cartoon with filmed live segments bookending the whole dealie.
When he died Moe Howard left behind an unfinished autobiography that was tentatively entitled I Stooge To Conquer, which I would have loved to have been able to read. For many years I belonged to The Official Three Stooges Fan Club [and recently came across all the newsletters in my file cabinet] and read a great deal about their history. The Three Stooges occupy a very narrow niche in Show Biz: Vaudevillians who transitioned to movies who transitioned to tee vee. There were many comedians, none of them slapstick comics for obvious reasons, who transitioned to radio before taking on tee vee.
Yet, despite my love for all things Stooge, this was the worst idea for a remake ever:
A dishonour. Watch a real Three Stooges classic. Moe Howard was imitating Adolph Hitler before Charlie Chaplin.
What’s really crazy is how much of this I knew by heart, only using Der Googlizer to make sure I had the dates right. I did. I’m such a dork.
Day In History ► Manhattan Island Sold
Dateline June 10, 1610 – The most one-sided real estate deal in history as the Dutch think they are buying Manhattan Island from the Natives. Whenever possible I get my history from Stan Freberg. This is from his “Stan Freberg Presents The History of the United States of America, Volume One,” animated by Saul Bass & Art Goodman for the February 4, 1962 broadcast of “Stan Freberg Presents The Chun King Chow Mein Hour: Salute to the Chinese New Year.”
You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby – NYT Decides To Capitalize Negro
Dateline June 7, 1930 – The New York Times decides to start capitalizing the word “Negro” out of respect.
Look, it’s just a truism that the English language, as well as the times—not to mention The Times—evolve. These days no one is ever pulled over for driving while Negro.
Meanwhile, here’s an article (PDF) in the very same NYT on January 10, 1903 arguing in favour of the capital “N,” so very many years before it ever happened. That’s only proof that the English language, as well as the times—not to mention The Times—evolve slowly. One day we can hope that no one will be pulled over for driving while Black.